This is a cautionary tale about how Agile planning can work wonders on projects where you’re required to herd cats. But that this requires you to be able to slip deadlines or scope (they’re cats, after all).

Then there’s patching. Microsoft issues patches once a month, and administrators test each before deployment. With services such as Google Apps, updates and patches happen automatically and without warning. If online applications become the primary tools for workflows and collaboration, as Microsoft Office is in many businesses, it’s possible that things could break.

In other words: “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.”Here we are encouraged to believe that its better to live at perpetual risk of virus attacks and buggy implementation of patches than to take a chance Google might do a better job than the local IT staff (or Microsoft) would.